Modern idealism

Modern idealism is a metaphysical philosophy that was advocated by Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Kant and Hegel held that, like the nominalists, that universals are not real, but are ideas in the minds of natural beings. Idealists do not reject universals' arbitrary names, but treat universals as fundamental categories of pure reason. Universals are intrinsically tied to the rationality of the subject making the judgment, and they are only tangentially a physical problem. Unlike their predecessors in the Middle Ages, idealists see universals as a problem of psychology and epistemology.